Perfect (Book Two)

Sixteen: Nice, Normal, Family Night At The Montgomerys'.

That night, Aria sat on her bed, knitting a stuffed owl out of mohair yarn. The owl was brown and boyish-looking; she'd started it the week before, thinking she would give it to Ezra. Now, that obviously wasn't happening, so she wondered...maybe she'd give it to Sean? How weird was that?

Before Ali went missing, she kept trying to set Aria up with Rosewood boys, saying, "Just go over and talk to him. It's not hard." But for Aria, it was hard. She got around a Rosewood boy and froze, blurting out the first idiotic thing that came out of her mouth—which, for some reason, was often about math. And she hated math. By the time she'd finished seventh grade, only one guy had spoken to her outside of class: Toby Cavanaugh.

And that had been scary. It was just a few weeks before Ali went missing, and Aria had signed up for a weekend arts camp, and who should show up in her workshop but Toby. Aria was astounded—wasn't he supposed to be in boarding school...forever? But apparently, his school broke for summer vacation earlier than Rosewood Day's did, and there he was. He sat in the corner, hair over his face, snapping a rubber band against his wrist.

Their drama teacher, a wispy, frizzy-haired woman who wore a lot of tie-dye, made everyone do a drama exercise: They paired up and shouted a phrase to each other over and over, getting into a rhythm. The phrase was supposed to change organically. They had to go around the room, partnering with everyone, and Aria soon found herself in front of Toby. The phrase for that day was, It never snows in the summer.

"It never snows in the summer," Toby said.

"It never snows in the summer," Aria said back to him.

"It never snows in the summer," Toby repeated. His eyes were sunken and his nails were bitten down to the quick. Aria felt twitchy standing this close to him. She couldn't help thinking about Toby's ghoulish face in Ali's window just before they hurt Jenna. And how the paramedics pulled Jenna down the tree house ladder, nearly dropping her. And how, a few days later, when they were at the Firework Safety Benefit, she overheard her health teacher, Mrs. Iverson, say, "If I were that boy's father, I wouldn't just send him to boarding school. I'd send him to jail."

And then the phrase did change. It became, I know what you did last summer. Toby was the one to say it first, but Aria shouted it back a few times before she realized what it really meant.

"Oh, like the movie!" the teacher cried, clapping her hands.

"Yep," Toby said, and smiled at Aria. A real smile, too, not a sinister one, which made her feel worse. When she told Ali what had happened, Ali sighed. "Aria, Toby's, like, mentally deranged. I heard he practically drowned up in Maine, swimming in a frozen creek, trying to take a picture of a moose."

But Aria never went back to drama class.

She thought again about A's Post-it. Wondering who I am? I'm closer than you think.

Could A be Toby? Had he sneaked into Rosewood Day and stuck that Post-it on Ali's case? Had any of her friends seen it? Or perhaps A was in one of her classes. Her English class would make the most sense—the timing of most of her notes revolved around them. But who? Noel? James Freed? Hanna?

Aria paused on Hanna. She'd wondered about her before—Ali could have told Hanna about her parents. And Hanna was part of The Jenna Thing.

But why?

She slipped through the Rosewood Day facebook—the directory that had just come out today of all her classmates' names and phone numbers—and found Sean's picture. His hair was sportily short, and he was bronzed like he'd spent the summer on his dad's yacht. The boys Aria dated in Iceland were pale and floppy-haired, and if the had boats, they were kayaks that they used to paddle to the Snarfellsjokull glacier.